Pages

Thursday, April 8, 2010

Delicious!

Today I'm going to tell you about a great tool for personal use of the Internet. It's such a big world out there, and this tool will help you organize it. It's called Delicious, and it's awesome.

You know how you often come across a site you want to save, so you bookmark it, and soon you have a mess of bookmarks that are all in a ginormous list? And then, when you're on another computer, you try to go to that site but remember that the site is saved on the other computer's Favorites? Or maybe you print off a recipe and somehow lose it, but can't find where you found it originally. Or maybe you don't even know what a "bookmark" is? Never fear; I can help.

What Delicious does is save your favorite places on the internet in one place, so that you can find them at home, at work, or on a Caribbean holiday (I wish!). I use my Delicious account to save links to the following:

*Great recipes when I find them but don't have time to cook or don't want to print them.
*Articles or resources on various topics that I want to keep for school (or home)
*Blogging tips/tricks
*Websites I might want to share with other people I know

You can make each individual place that you save either public or private. The thing that makes Delicious a Web 2.0 tool (a tool that moves you from a passive internet user and to an active one) is that millions of other people are doing the same thing; saving their favorite places on the Internet and making those favorites public. So...let's say you hadn't yet found the site you wanted on....say...making stilts. Instead of searching Google, Dogpile, or whatever, you could go to Delicious and search by the tag, "stilts" and find the favorite stilt-making sites from users around the world, not just the stilt-making companies who paid the most to get their name at the top of the Google search. It's kind of like on-line word-of-mouth for websites. Because you're sharing your favorites, and others are sharing theirs, Delicious is also called "social bookmarking."

Instead of saving the website and putting it in a single folder, you can tag it with as many tags as you want. So, I can save my famous White Chicken Chili recipe with tags of: chili, chicken, favorite recipes, White Chicken Chili, etc. That way, millions of people could find it, but if I can't remember where I saved it, all I need to do is log in and search by one of my tags. It's a beautiful thing, I tell you.

So why not go play over at Delicious? It's free to see what's there. Take a look at today's Hotlist of sites people are saving, or explore a tag you're interested in. If you have a friend using Delicious, you can even go to their pages and see what they find interesting or valuable. For example, here's mine.

What are you waiting for? Go play! :)

P.S. The Delicious "people" have no idea I wrote about their site; I did not write this as a paid or compensated review; I simply love the site and wanted to share it.

Button, button, who's got a button? Click on the Blogroll tab at the top of this page for a visual cornucopia of blog buttons from some of my favorite bloggers, ripe for the picking! Don't see yours? Send the code my way, and I'd be happy to add it :)

FEEDJIT Live Traffic Map

Mom always said that copying is the sincerest form of flattery. In this case, she is wrong. Copying my writings/photos (without my permission) is just plain stealing. Mom might forgive you, but I won't. Don't do it.